Xfce Forum

littlebigman

Member

Registered: 2007-02-22

Posts: 5

[SOLVED] [4.6.1] "Can't open display"

Hello

I am trying to use the Ubuntu 9.10-based BitDefender Rescue Disk on USB and CDROM on two different hosts, and am having the following issues:

1. On an Acer Aspire L100 desktop with an "Integrated NVIDIA® GeForce® 6150 graphics", I can't get better than 800x600, which is too low for the BitDefender application to run (complains about the definition being too low).

I tried the following, to no avail:

# gtf 1024 768 75

# 1024x768 @ 75.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 60.15 kHz; pclk: 81.80 MHz
Modeline "1024x768_75.00"  81.80  1024 1080 1192 1360  768 769 772 802  -HSync +Vsync

# xrandr --newmode "1024x768_75.00"  81.80  1024 1080 1192 1360  768 769 772 802  -HSync +Vsync
Can't open display

2. On the other host, which is an Acer 3810 laptop, although I selected French as the language to be used when prompted by BitDefender at boot-time, the layout is US, but I can't get it to work in French. I tried both commands in a terminal window:

# loadkeys fr
"Cannot open display "default display"".

# setxkbmap fr
"Cannot open display "default display"".

FWIW, hosts and monitors support 1024x768@75Hz under Windows after installing the required driver.

Any idea what I could try?

Thank you.

littlebigman

Member

Registered: 2007-02-22

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] [4.6.1] "Can't open display"

More progress... leading nowhere:

# echo $DISPLAY
:0.0

# xhost +localhost
No protocol specified
xhost:  unable to open display ":0.0"

Read that on Debian/Ubuntu, by default, X is configured with "-nolisten tcp":

# ps aux | grep X | grep -v grep
root      2477  0.1  1.7  23552 17056 tty7     Ss+  16:37   0:06
/usr/bin/X11/X -nolisten tcp -auth /var/run/slim.auth vt07

So looked for configuration file...

# find / -name "gdm*"
/etc/gdm
/var/lib/update-rc.d/gdm
/rofs/etc/gdm
/rofs/var/lib/update-rc.d/gdm

# ll /etc/gdm/
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  126 2010-08-12 18:30 custom.conf
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  132 2008-06-25 02:05 failsafeBlacklist
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 8620 2009-03-17 08:59 failsafeDexconf
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 8523 2009-11-05 02:48 failsafeXinit
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 4559 2009-11-09 07:58 failsafeXServer

# gdmsetup
Command not found

Edited /etc/gdm/custom.conf to add this:

[Security]
DisallowTCP=false

Logged off, logged back on (this live CD is not persistent, so can't reboot and keep settings):

# xhost +localhost
xhost:  unable to open display ":0.0"

Were there major changes in Ubuntu 9.10 that would explain this permission issue + missing configuration files?

Thank you.

littlebigman

Member

Registered: 2007-02-22

Posts: 5

Re: [SOLVED] [4.6.1] "Can't open display"

For those having the same issue: It might be distro-dependent, but on the liveCD I'm using, "setxkbmap" can only run as non-root. OTOH, "loadkeys" can only run as root.